uucp sitenames

[lauren at RAND-UNIX.ARPA]

From:  Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren at RAND-UNIX.ARPA>

As it turns out, the problem of long (> 6 or > 7) sitenames in the UUCP's
that allow such names (when talking to other software that doesn't) can
be fixed by clever additions of multiple sitename entries in the
appropriate tables.  However, it should be noted that the UUCP project
plans to insist on 6 char uniqueness in sitenames for the immediate to
middle future.  Once again, this is UNIQUENESS, not absolute length.
The problem of truncated sitenames is not going to go away.  In fact,
on some OS's for which UUCP's are about to become available, the 
directory organizations which could allow for longer sitenames simply
are not practical.  The number of UUCP's running on these systems might
quickly outnumber all other UUCP versions combined, which means that
truncation (in this case at 7 characters) will be present for a very
long time to come on a very large number of sites.  A necessary evil
on many small systems.

--Lauren--